On Jan. 26, 2022, an international research team with the Serratus Project announced they had used a supercomputer read through 20 million gigabytes of publicly available gene sequence data from 5.7 million biological samples around the world, searching for a specific gene that indicated the presence of an RNA virus. The researchers found 132,000 RNA viruses (where just 15,000 were known previously) and nine new species of coronaviruses.

Serratus is a free, open-source cloud-computing infrastructure optimized for petabase-scale sequence alignment against a set of query sequences.